Pipe

Seeking an annus mirabilis.

What’s the prettiest thought you ever had?

That the pipe is a cunt you can beat someone with.

That the cunt is a pipe you can play music with.

I haven’t thought about cocks in a while, to be honest.

I’ve thought more about my chest, does it feel softer?

It looks softer, more fertile, and I look softer as well.

I still listen to angels. I’m resting in soft-conched ears.

It was a sounding grotto, vaulted, vast,
O’er studded with a thousand, thousand pearls,
And crimson mouthed shells with stubborn curls,
Of every shape and size, even to the bulk
In which whales arbour close, to brood and sulk
Against an endless storm.

O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
Even into thine own soft-conched ear:
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?

Look, here lies the problem of fertility made entirely banal and struck down.

I don’t need this or that, don’t need to print a validation of my image as a vessel of ovaries.

There’s something very satisfying about curling up in text, becoming a pupila.

What led me here? A desire to mimic him, to imbibe his sweet dreams?

I’m probably best when there’s nothing go on.
(But only after something has gone on.)

Stalling is placed over an actual blank,
(What is the substance in the air?)

It was Keats, of course.

With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,

Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same

A pipe is an item you beat someone with, but it’s also a musical instrument. Fluid flows through a pipe. What must I do to gain control over my pipe, the pipe that’s a windbag, the pipe that’s my cunt? The pipe, not the pen. “Regain control” shouldn’t be looked upon with too much skepticism; there is a discipline, an activity, a habitual regulation of habit, which leads to the creation of things. I told my analyst that the real reason I was in analysis was to become a better writer, as embarrassing as it is. I think I’m dedicated to matters of the soul and heart but in reality I am nothing more than one of those flimsy men who have nothing to leave on earth except for a body of work. I must give up on my maternal gluttony, I’m not worthy of that right now. Right now, I’m twenty-four and I’m taken aback by what Keats managed to do when he was twenty-three, in 1819. I think Keats is not a psychoanalytic poet but that if I could just write one poem that was like one of his I’d feel like I was ready to take on a monster of a psyche. Peloric phalaenopsis orchids are not particularly appealing to me, but the root word of peloric is, πέλωρ [monster].

This post is going to be a failure, and I know it.

Please fix me, it’s becoming urgent.

I’ve never understood there to be a division between the aesthetic life and the ethical life. (Either/Or)

I can’t figure out a justification for this, but they feel bound into the notion of the fertile life.

Does it make sense to write when you believe you have nothing to write?

It makes more sense to say “I have nothing to say” than “I have nothing to write.”

If I have something to say, and I decide to write it, I have to compare what I end up writing against what I meant to say. If I have nothing to say, I just need to read the writing and compare it against itself. I need to check if it sounds good and if it has the right consistency, if ideas are repeated or echoed at the correct frequencies, and if the asymmetries branch in the right directions.

I also need to imagine what it wants to mean and see if it’s responding to its own desires.

“A lot of ethical questions were related to failing to cause people to be born.”
She read this and swooned, almost knocking her head against the edge
of the table, and crawled to the sheepskin on the floor where she laid
face-down. She had had an idea of what to say but nothing was said.

Here’s a dumb poem that I wrote the other day:

Because of tradition, it’s important to fornicate; to bake

the prose into the cutting edge of poetry, and make sure

that each swoon results in a sweet rhyme, for without

that motor of forgetting and remembrance, nothing

comes into focus. I’ve failed, I’ve failed, I’ve failed.

In embarking on a written cure, what might be lost?

The sessions aren’t representable in language.

Welcome me back when I rhyme by accident.

I believe in the fitness of evolutionary forms, but I have to think about what this means.

However hard we work against tradition, things tend to fall into their familiar places.

I wish I were better at cribbing things, as everything good has already been done,

But I don’t write to be good so it’s fine. Writing exists between “need” and “want”?

I’d like to be a brain-sick shepherd-prince,
who lives among the woods of mossy oaks,
those woe-worn minutes logged by the strokes
of a lone woodcutter…. as she listens still
by a lush-leav’d rill, while he, by a shady spring
elbow-deep with feverous fingering stems the upbursting cold…

I’d like to say “Lo!” and rhyme it with “how!”
I’d like to find a bud which snares my fancy and
have it swell and bud beneath my sight and to
rhyme “beneath his sight” with “is softly pight”

But I don’t need a golden butterfly to find
things strange character’d on an orchid’s face,
and to end a poem by saying that he smiles oft !!!

(Italicized words from Endymion, Book II)

I said that I had two problems, one of them involved working around the degenerate repetition of my eroticism, the other involved understanding friendship, which is more interesting and useful as a basis for narrative desire than the objects of sexual desire. The good writers are finding a way not to write to the beloved but to write about the figures they admire, women write about the women they envy.